SIPO and WIPO jointly held a seminar in the city of Shantou

On September 22, co-hosted by SIPO and WIPO and organized by Shantou Intellectual Property Office, the Seminar on Effective Application of Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs was held in the city of Shantou，Guangdong province. Wang Xiaoyun, the Deputy Director-General of International Cooperation Department under SIPO, LvGuoliang, the Deputy Head of WIPO Chinese Office and Lin Xiaoyong, the Vice Mayor of Shantou Municipality attended the seminar.

It is learned that in order to promote better understanding of businesses, R&D institutions, industrial designers and the general public regarding the foreign design systems, in particular the Hague Agreement concerning the international registration of industrial designs, the seminar invited officials and experts from WIPO and SIPO to analyze in-depth the design protection both at home and abroad and pay a visit to the enterprises in Shantou and China Shantou (Toys) Fast IP Protection Center for the field investigation. Lin Xiaoyong mentioned in his remarks that it was hoped that the businesses, universities, academic institutions, IP service providers and IP managers could ta ke this good opportunity to strengthen exchanges and cooperation with their colleagues, counterparts and experts, and to keep improving their capabilities in IP system application, so that they could inject new impetus to the initiative “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” and ma ke contributions to the realization of innovation-driven development and economic transformation and upgrading city-wide.

Over the past five years, Shantou has received 35,065 design patent applications and granted 26,093 design patents, ranking at the leading position within the province and in the East, West and North of Guangdong. The design patents have arisen as one of the key brea kthrough for a large number of SMEs in improving their innovation capability and accelerating the transformation and upgrading.